A Study Of Verb Collocations In Examples Of The New Century Multi-functional English-Chinese Dictionary

More and more scholars pay special attention to the study of collocations. It is usually seen that the learners misuse a collocation while they know the meaning of each word well. This thesis focuses on V-N collocation as well as verb colligation. As shown by the statistics from Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC), V-N collocation becomes one of the most prominent types of errors among Chinese learners of English. And it is also observed that the types of verb colligation chosen by the Chinese learners differ greatly from those chosen by native speakers. By means of the comparison of the existing evidence of CLEC and the Brown Corpus, this paper aims to investigate the differences between Chinese learners and native speakers in verb collocations.Among various dictionaries, English Chinese learner's dictionaries (ECLDs) are more generally employed by Chinese learners in learning a foreign language. The New Century Multi-functional English-Chinese Dictionary (NCMECD) is an ECLD that claims to be quite successful because it meets the demands of Chinese EFL learners, and it pays much attention to collocations. This paper selects four verbs, i.e., develop, reach, keep and provide, to research in detail the disadvantages of the arrangement of verb collocations in illustrative examples in this dictionary.Four major disadvantages in NCMECD are revealed:1) Some of the V-N collocations listed in the examples of the entry are lack of typicality and authenticity;2) Some typical verb patterns are missing in the dictionary;3) The examples of grammatical collocation are repetitious rather than brief;4) Chinese learners' special needs are not well considered.And two suggestions are made for the improvement of NCMECD as follows:1) Selecting collocations from large-scale native corpora as well as existing monolingual learner's dictionaries;2) Making careful analysis of Chinese learner corpora: adopting error warning marks.